Project leader: Oxford's COVID-19 vaccine trial has 50% chance of success - Telegraph

(Reuters) - The University of Oxford's COVID-19 vaccine trial has only a 50% chance of success as the coronavirus seems to be fading rapidly in Britain, the professor co-leading the development of the vaccine told the Telegraph newspaper https://bit.ly/2LQTNos.

Adrian Hill, director of Oxford's Jenner Institute, which has teamed up with drugmaker AstraZeneca Plc <AZN.L> to develop the vaccine, said that an upcoming trial, involving 10,000 volunteers, threatened to return "no result" due to low transmission of COVID-19 in the community.

"It's a race against the virus disappearing, and against time", Hill told the British newspaper. "At the moment, there's a 50% chance that we get no result at all."

The experimental vaccine, known as ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, is one of the front-runners in the global race to provide protection against the new coronavirus causing the COVID-19 pandemic.

Hill's team began early-stage human trials of the vaccine in April, making it one of only a handful to have reached that milestone.

(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru; editing by Jonathan Oatis)